Smashing Atoms In SpaceChem’s Sandbox

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I won’t pretend to understand the complexities of SpaceChem, Zachtronics’ chemical puzzler. Not in the guided single-player mode, nor the sandbox that was added to allow a player to complete the computer he was building within the game. With that sandbox came a challenge for players to build “the most awesome sandbox pipeline imaginable”. The winners are almost mocking in their complexity, given that my chemical romance never got beyond first base. Come revel in their ingenuity and marvel at my utter ignorance. I have marked where I lose the ability to comprehend each.
That player, Peer, got his wish. The sandbox additions enabled him to create a computer within the game: it took 60 hours of game time and a month of real-world brainwork to produce his “programmable interpreter for the brainfuck programming language”*.

I can only appreciate it in the way a dog appreciates the writing of an Ingmar Bergman movie on the telly. It is pretty.

GuavaMoment’s Recycler Looks simple, but then his video shows you the underlying structure and how it unbonds** whatever passes through it, turning anything into water.

I thought I had a chance when I saw cave>pie had made a Tic-Tac-Toe game, but then it used pairs of H/He/Li to describe coordinate positions***. I was robbed of the simple pleasure of an understandable game of Xs and Os.

I’ll leave you to discover the final winner on the SpaceChem page, because I’m a) nice, and b) crying.

* Nope. Dunno.** I’m making that “way over my head” hand sign”.*** Tic-Tac-Wow, more like. Not got a clue.

Initial reaction: Ahhh, there’s the trademark RPS hyperbole I know and love.
2min into first video, and I’m a giggling, panicky mess, manic with confusion and awe in equal amounts. Tears of frustration slide down my cheeks.

Yeah, a parenthesis is missing along with some other characters and it bothered me enough that I installed a brainfuck interpreter to try to debug it. As far as I can tell it’s a slightly truncated version of the example on the Wikipedia page and it prints “Hello orrr!”.

I’m guessing that the RPS comment-o-tron chopped some characters out of Kaira’s original post.

You play Spacechem to feel smart when you finally crack that puzzle with an absolutely amazing “super-genius” solution (the one that took you AGES to figure out and program in all its beautiful synchronicity) .

Then you glance at where you lie on the bell curve, and start weeping quietly in a corner somewhere.

Seriously, the way the game aggregates stats and shows you where you lie in the grand scheme of things is one of the most brilliant and outright DEVIOUS things about it.

I don’t care about high scores in other gamers, but it becomes intensely personal when you take forever on a solution and find out someone’s made one that makes your elegant solution look like the application of a hammer and nails.

“It is an implementation of a cellular automaton using a molecular ring. Technically, it is a one-dimensional elementary cellular automaton of length 12 with periodic boundary conditions. Using a common template and toolbox, there are actually several sandboxes that implement a variety of the Wolfram rules for cellular automaton.”